![]() The only manager to get really close to winning Serie A for Napoli before Spalletti was Maurizio Sarri. Carlo Ancelotti arrived in 2018 having won three Champions Leagues and league titles all over Europe, but he only lasted one season and a half, before being sacked and joining Everton. He won them a Coppa Italia but finished third and fifth in the league and left to take over at Real Madrid. Rafa Benitez had won almost everything there was to win with Valencia, Liverpool, Inter Milan and Chelsea when he showed up at Napoli in 2013. And if they had hoped that some of that winning experience or winning mentality would rub off on their football club and help them to finally win Serie A, well, it did not. Because Napoli had already tried appointing proven winners, managers who had won trophies almost everywhere they had been. ![]() The idea that he would end the 33-year drought would have been fanciful in the extreme. So when Spalletti took over at Napoli, it felt like he was there to transform the technical quality of Napoli’s football post-Gattuso, and ideally to get them back into the top four. The two Russian Premier League titles he won with Zenit Saint Petersburg did not convince many people otherwise. And it reinforced the image of Spalletti as a coach who could get his teams playing beautiful football, rather than someone you would turn to to ensure you won a trophy. It did not win Roma the title - something they have not won since 2001 - but he had two Coppa Italias to show for it. He was most famous for his four years in charge of Roma, where his imaginative and innovative style of football took root. Spalletti had a good career up to this point. Spalletti was 62 years old and it was natural to wonder whether his moment had passed. Spalletti had spent the previous two years effectively on gardening leave, at home on his farm in Tuscany, after Inter Milan sacked him to appoint Antonio Conte. Go back to when he got the job, replacing Gennaro Gattuso in the summer of 2021. The fact it will be Spalletti, of all the various Napoli coaches, who will end this long wait is worth thinking about. But in an important way, it will belong to Luciano Spalletti, the manager appointed two years ago and who is on the brink of doing something the last 31 Napoli coaches could not. ![]() It will belong to owner Aurelio De Laurentiis, who has spent almost 20 years trying to get Napoli back to the top of Italian football. It will belong to Victor Osimhen, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Kim Min-jae. The title will belong to the whole city, to the fans who have waited since Diego Maradona’s time to become champions. ![]()
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